Yesterday, I overheard a coworker say to my boss “Hey, did you get Firefox 3 yet??”. This coworker is not techy at all and still uses a mix of IE and Firefox at work. I think it is kind of cool he was aware of FF, but I am fairly sure he just saw the Firefox Downloads Try to Break Guinness World Record headline that morning, so it was top of mind.
I don’t care if that’s why, really. Yes, this is a publicity stunt, but it is mostly harmless, and it seems to be working. I love my little heat squirrel, and if more people can find solace in his furry and fiery embrace, excellent. I do hope, though, that the FF3 has fixes some of the memory leaks. Yes, yes, I have tuned the settings — all those crazy things with cacheing and whatnot — and it just never helped. I’m not complaining for myself . I’m fine with Firefox 2. It rarely crashes, and I will never go back to IE, but I fear that less loyal people will get a Firefox 3 that is ablaze for all the wrong reasons and turn to the dark side forever.
If FF crashes and hogs RAM while IE doesn’t, then it some ways, it isn’t the dark side, but the right side, now that IE7 has tabs. The casual user wants it to just work. Tabbed browsing was an awesome advantage over IE before, but now that they are equalized there, the only differences are rendering, performance, and addons. The casual user doesn’t care that IE ignores various web standards. They assume the page is broken. They will not be so cavalier about crashes.
To rebound from that depressing thought, I am intrigued by the notion of Download/BYOBrowser parties. I’ve suggested to Louis that we hold one, bringing the liquor while our friends bring their laptops. He only nervously laughed when I suggest we provide beer, then offer to open the hard stuff once the assembled group has solved our centos SMTP problem. I’m pretty sure it’d solve the issue, and I think paying them with vodka is, in fact, more ethical than asking friends to help for free.
Friends don’t let friends give free advice, right?